On 07/10/2012 10:53 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 22:40:17 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2012-07-10 22:25, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Which is horrible. You pretty much have to with HTML because of the horrid
decision that it should be parsed so laxly by browsers, but pretty much
nothing else should do that. Either it's correct or it's not. Having the
compiler "fix" your code would cause far more problems that it would ever
fix.
I'm not sure but I think he was referring to a kind of error reporting
technique used by compilers. Example:
int foo ()
{
int a = 3 // note the missing semicolon
return a;
}
Instead of the parser going completely mad because of the missing
semicolon. It will basically insert a semicolon, report the error and
then happily continue parsing. I think this will make it easier to find
later errors and less likely to report incorrect errors due to a
previous error.
Well, giving an error, continuing to parse, and giving a partial result can be
useful (and you give a prime example of that), but "fixing" the problem (e.g by
inserting the semicolon) and not considering it to be an error would be a
_huge_ mistake IMHO.
This is actually precisely what many of the more recent curly-brace-
and-semicolon languages have been doing with regard to semicolons.
